Physics, Pixelated

Pixel-art illustration: three translucent ghost neutrino characters in cyan, white and lime fly in straight dotted lines from a lime Sun right through a blue and green Earth, above an underground water tank lit by faint ring flashes.

What Are Neutrinos? The Ghost Particles That Pa...

Neutrinos are the most elusive particles we know of. Thousands of billions stream through your body every second without touching you. Pauli invented them in 1930 to save energy conservation,...

What Are Neutrinos? The Ghost Particles That Pa...

Neutrinos are the most elusive particles we know of. Thousands of billions stream through your body every second without touching you. Pauli invented them in 1930 to save energy conservation,...

Pixel-art illustration: a cluster of round pink and blue nucleons forms a nucleus inside a short-range force glow, as two smiling nucleons toss a heavy green meson character across a tiny gap, with faint cosmic-ray streaks above.

Hideki Yukawa and the Meson: How a Force’s Rang...

In 1934 Hideki Yukawa asked why the force that holds the nucleus together reaches only about the width of a proton. His answer: a force carried by a particle with...

Hideki Yukawa and the Meson: How a Force’s Rang...

In 1934 Hideki Yukawa asked why the force that holds the nucleus together reaches only about the width of a proton. His answer: a force carried by a particle with...

Pixel-art illustration: a grid of tiny up and down spin arrows, all aligned on the left, forming islands of every size in the middle and scattered at random on the right, with a smiling horseshoe magnet character below.

The Ising Model Explained: How Tiny Arrows Expl...

The Ising model is the simplest picture of a magnet: a grid of arrows that can only point up or down, each wanting to match its neighbours. Heat scrambles them;...

The Ising Model Explained: How Tiny Arrows Expl...

The Ising model is the simplest picture of a magnet: a grid of arrows that can only point up or down, each wanting to match its neighbours. Heat scrambles them;...

Pixel-art illustration: a cyan telescope on a dark hill sends a wavy light beam carrying a smiling light-wave character toward a star imaged as a bright Airy disk with rings, while an X-ray beam reflects off a small crystal lattice.

The Airy Disk and the Diffraction Limit: Why Ev...

A perfect lens still cannot focus light to a point. Waves spread out after passing through any opening, so every star becomes a tiny bright disk with faint rings, the...

The Airy Disk and the Diffraction Limit: Why Ev...

A perfect lens still cannot focus light to a point. Waves spread out after passing through any opening, so every star becomes a tiny bright disk with faint rings, the...

Pixel-art pulsar: a spinning neutron star sweeps two radio beams out of opposite magnetic poles, tilted from its vertical spin axis, past a row of radio dishes

Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the Discovery of Pulsars

In late 1967 Jocelyn Bell, a PhD student at Cambridge, noticed a strange signal among miles of chart paper. It turned out to be a pulsar, a spinning neutron star....

Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the Discovery of Pulsars

In late 1967 Jocelyn Bell, a PhD student at Cambridge, noticed a strange signal among miles of chart paper. It turned out to be a pulsar, a spinning neutron star....

Pixel-art illustration for this Pixelated Physics post: a puzzled pixel lithium atom character in an old star, looking for its missing two thirds of friends, early-universe glow behind

The Cosmological Lithium Problem: Big Bang’s Mi...

The Big Bang’s first minutes forged hydrogen, helium and a trace of lithium, and the theory matches deuterium and helium beautifully. Lithium-7 is the odd one out: the oldest stars...

The Cosmological Lithium Problem: Big Bang’s Mi...

The Big Bang’s first minutes forged hydrogen, helium and a trace of lithium, and the theory matches deuterium and helium beautifully. Lithium-7 is the odd one out: the oldest stars...